Sometime in January, the owners in the august National Football League will determine which teams or team will be given permission to pack up and move, either to Carson or Inglewood.

Robles has a stake in the outcome. He’s mayor of Carson. If the seemingly unlikely tag team of the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders prevail, they will trigger construction of a stadium in his town. If the winner is the St. Louis Rams, hard hats will go to work in Inglewood.

“It’s kind of like the selection of a new pope,” Robles said. “They’re going to go into their conclave, no one is going to know what happens (who says what to or about whom) in the room, they’re going to vote and they’re going to come out and they’ll tell us (what they decided).”

The mayor provided his analogy when he spoke at the weekly South Bay Athletic Club lunch in Redondo Beach.

Someone in the audience could not resist asking, “Will there be white smoke?”

Half the Carson city flag is blue. Yes, blue also is the color of Carson High’s athletic teams.

Robles is a Narbonne High graduate with a bachelor’s degree from Colorado, a masters from USC and a law degree from Cal. He spoke with passion to the SBAC for more than a half-hour, never pausing to take a deep breath, outlining Carson’s position as well as answering questions from his inquisitive audience.

It must be noted that Inglewood mayor James Butts also has been invited to address the SBAC. To this point, he has not responded.

Understandably, Robles said, “I believe that Carson is a better choice for three reasons — location, location, location. That’s it. Everything else being equal, Carson wins because of our location” on 157 acres at the corner of Main Street and Del Amo Boulevard in the shadow of the 110 and 405 freeways and not all that far from the 91 and 710 freeways.

And he believes, also understandably, everything else is at least equal if not tipping in favor of Carson.

The playbook Carson is using in partnership with the Chargers and Raiders comes directly from the City of Santa Clara, which joined hands with the 49ers to form a stadium authority to build, own and run Levi’s Stadium.

A major complaint about the Carson site, when previous groups talked about building there, has been that it is a landfill, which is a fancy term for a garbage dump covered with dirt, which means lack of solid ground along with toxic wastes, which require massive cleanup efforts.

Robles meets this question head-on, pointing to built-on-a-landfill MetLife Stadium at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J.

“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “That stadium was built on piles, piles that go down 100 feet down to bedrock. There’s a platform and the stadium is built on the platform. Our stadium is going to be built on piles, just like the Meadowlands.”

His pitch includes the fact that the Giants and Jets share MetLife Stadium, just as the Chargers and Raiders will, he hopes, share the Carson stadium.

Another point Robles repeats, and repeats, is that no public funds will be used to finance construction. Funding will be organized and managed by Goldman Sachs, the multinational finance company, as was the case in Santa Clara.

One reason sidewalk superintendent types think Inglewood has an edge is Rams owner Stan Kroenke is worth $6 billion and his wife, Ann Walton Kroenke, is worth another $6 billion.

Robles races right back to Goldman Sachs, pointing out the firm has a bigger vault than the Kroenke family.

Yet another point in favor of Carson could be that when the owners become cardinals and decide between Carson and Inglewood, personal relationships could drive how they vote.

This would seem to give Carson a two-to-one edge.

Raiders owner Mark Davis, the son of the late Al Davis, and the Chargers’ Alex Spanos likely have more relationships among fellow owners simply because they outnumber Kroenke. Chargers chairman of the board Dean Spanos, son of Alex, is an added entry on the Carson side.

Davis-Spanos pre-date Kroenke, who became part-owner of the Rams in 1995, taking over full ownership in 2000. Al Davis was a coach and commissioner of the old AFL going back to 1960 before moving into the managing-general partner slot with the Raiders in 1966. Spanos took over the Chargers in 1984.

But you never know. Pete Rozelle, when he was NFL commissioner, used to say owners could not decide what to order for lunch when they took a break from a meeting.

Why should we expect owners who have followed in their footsteps to have more clarity when it comes time to decide between Carson and Inglewood?

Clearing out the mini-notebook:

Just asking — How many MLB owners noticed Kansas City’s Ned Yost, the winning manager in the World Series, is old school, which runs counter to the current trend to hire a robot who answers to a young computer nerd general manager who expects to tell his also young manager how to do his job? …

Tale of Troy — Will USC panic and overpay to get a so-called name coach, and within a year drop an Olympic sport for budget reasons? …

Opinion — Cheers for USA Basketball chairman Jerry Colangelo for deciding to turn over the national team to Gregg Popovich when Mike Krzyzewski finishes as coach in the 2016 Olympics. …

Bottom line — Rick Pitino remaining Louisville’s basketball coach demonstrates the value of winning big in college athletics as well as why coaches are willing to push the envelope and/or cheat.

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